We’ll always have Paris

Saturday, November 14, 2015

I keep thinking of the flash back scene from the movie Casablanca, and the moment when the Nazi armies rolled into Paris – this slow motion sense of doom that we no longer can depend upon.

We had a lot of warning then about the rise of evil in Europe, and those who had the ability to  flee, did so or stayed at their own peril.

As with contemporary times, plenty of factors contributed to the final Blitzkrieg that eventually turned a whole continent to ash: Chamberlain, the unfair reparation payments from World War I, the mean spirited victors in the West, greedy corporations American and European who saw profit in a well-run Fascistic system, and others.

But once the guns started and doom approached, Paris needed more than just people and things to blame as to why they were about to be consumed.

Last night, Paris burned again.

There are plenty of guilty parties as to why, some wearing suits and ties or bearing diplomatic pouches, some simply press credentials (refusing to challenge the stupid foreign policies in the middle east), but once the guns started and the bombs exploded, and innocent people started to perish, blame meant nothing.

We live in a world where the conflict rarely reaches the real culprits, the oil company executives or the food companies whose infant formulas kill kids in third world countries, the violence reaches those who do not have private armies to protect them; the violence strikes those who go to work on a sunny Tuesday in September or to a rock concert on a cool Friday, and its leaves carnage that makes headlines, but never makes people understand just who exactly is to blame.

Blame does not stop the bleeding or make up for the loss of life.

Once the violence starts, it starts on both side, and one act leads to another as survivors call for vengeance, not justice, and we create a police state to finally protect those who should never had been the subject of an attack in the first place.

I keep thinking of another more recent Harrison Ford movie in which an Arab kid is hounded out of the country by ICE (our version of ISIS) for daring to write an honest essay about 9/11 and the perspective of the Arabs might have had in striking out at the United States.

No one actually listened to essay, they simply painted the girl as a terrorist sympathizer because she was saying something no body wanted to hear or will ever want to hear, painting the terrorists in a light that is no simply to make them look evil. Evil is such a subjective word. Beheading people is evil. Blowing up people is evil. But so is torturing suspects, and selectively killing people by remote control.

The same day Paris happened, American drones incinerated two people we suspect as terrorists. While I doubt there is a direct connection, it is part of the pattern of misperception. When we bomb innocents, it always an accident, we always say we’re sorry, we always want the other side to forget the loved one we incinerate.

This, of course, reminds me of yet another movie, some of the Terminator series were remote control craft seek and destroy freedom fighters, and though I know those who we actually target are vicious killers, they do not see themselves that way, and until we come to grips with the real causes of this conflict, and stop people like Kerry and Clinton from choosing which country ought to have leaders acceptable to us, these people will keep attacking us, because they think we are evil, and that our corporations that steal their resources and sell bad food to their kids, ought to be stopped by any means necessary. They, of course, are misguided, thinking they have god on their side. But then, our money also professes a similar slogan, as we make weapons dealers wealthy in our perpetual wars.